The fog lifts on a very modern Dickens

Sarah Crompton

12:01AM GMT 02 Nov 2005

There are certain moans about the state of television today that come round as regularly as Bonfire Night. One is that there is nothing to watch. This is clearly untrue, since there are not only more channels than ever before, but some are actually putting on quite a few things that you would want to tune into, whether your taste runs to high opera, low sport or just a jolly good documentary on BBC4.

Another is that no one knows how to make a classic serial any more. Depending on the length of your memory you might cite The Forsyte Saga, The Pallisers, Brideshead Revisited or even Pride and Prejudice in support of your case - and then along comes Bleak House and your argument is knocked clean out of the water.

Andrew Davies's adaptation of Charles Dickens's massive novel, which attracted an impressive 6.6 million viewers (7.2 million at peak) on its first outing last week, looks like being one of those programmes that embed themselves in the minds of everyone who sees them as something definitive and special.

For one thing, it looks fantastic. It cost £8 million to make, but every penny is clearly visible on screen. More important still, however, is the imaginative clarity that the adapters have brought to bear. They are not just interested in recreating Victorian London for the sake of it; each image that flashes in front of our eyes also serves the purpose of reinforcing the metaphorical and emotional power of the narrative.

It does this in entirely televisual terms. In the first two episodes, the adapter, director (Justin Chadwick) and director of photography (Kieran McGuigan) had the courage to dispense with Dickens's famous fog, and to replace it with scenes full of bleached-out blues and browns, where life seems to be hanging by very small threads. Many conversations are framed through windows and doorways, creating a fretwork of repeated images which emphasises the interconnectedness of apparently disparate characters.

What's more, because Davies's adaptation is in 15 parts (in half-hour chunks on Thursdays and Fridays), it has a richness and density that are rare in television adaptation. He has had to sacrifice some comic flourishes - the Dickens Fellowship was very upset on the radio the other morning about the loss of the envelopes in the gravy of Mrs Jellyby, the philanthropist who has no time to care for her own family. But the fact is that Mrs Jellyby was there; and her son did have his head stuck through the railings and had to be rescued by the common sense of the heroic Esther; and in this way Davies has been given time and space to allow Dickens's characters to develop and flourish just as they did on the page. There is no sense of skimping on the detail.

This duration - for all those who worry about television dumbing down - makes it 80 minutes longer than the last great BBC version of Bleak House, by Arthur Hopcraft in 1985, though not admittedly as long as War and Peace (20 parts and 892 minutes in 1972) or The Forsyte Saga, which launched the classic serial boom in 1967 and ran to 999 minutes. What it also shares with such classic adaptations is a top-notch cast almost champing at the bit with the delight of being able to get their teeth into such wonderful characters.

This is not to imply over-acting. On the basis of what we have seen, one of the delights of this Bleak House is its restraint. Even comic actors such as Johnny Vegas as Krook and Alistair McGowan as the lawyer Kenge are behaving in a way that is very far from stock Dickensian caricature; Burn Gorman as the hapless Guppy is well on his way to producing a new archetype.

Anna Maxwell Martin's strong but sweet-natured Esther has a stillness and power that confirm the star quality many spotted when she appeared on stage in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. And the scenes in which Charles Dance's icily sinister Tulkinghorn attempts to uncover the secrets withheld by Gillian Anderson's beautifully miserable Lady Dedlock chill you to the bone precisely because so little is said but so much communicated.

With Alun Armstrong, Phil Davis and Hugo Speer yet to appear in juicy parts, it's hard not to recognise that the strength in depth of actors in this country is one reason for the continuing health of the classic serial. The other is that generations of television writers have proved very adept at producing adaptations that straddle the chasm between the past and their own times.

Where this Bleak House differs from its illustrious predecessors is in presentation: it is scheduled behind EastEnders and is marketed as suitable for the same audience, i.e. as soap opera rather than stuffy highbrow serial. This is not at all unfaithful to the spirit of Dickens - he wrote the novel in 19 parts - and since it has involved, as far as one can see, no diminution in quality, is a rather enterprising attempt on the part of the BBC to get as many people as possible gripped by a work written in 1853.

This endeavour has, however, affected the pace. It began with a girl being bundled into a darkened carriage and has raced along pell-mell ever since. Scenes are fast-cut and interlocking, separated by swishing, electronic noise more usually associated with thrillers such as 24.

I find it all rather gripping - but it is as absolutely unlike Andrew Davies's earlier adaptations of Middlemarch (1994) and Pride and Prejudice (1995), as they were different in pace and tone from Alan Plater's The Barchester Chronicles (1982) or Simon Raven's The Pallisers in 1974.

Whatever its source material, television has to work for its own times and on its own terms. How lucky we are to have adapters capable of realising that and thus of serving up classic serials for different generations that thrill as television and help to keep literature of the past vibrant and in the spotlight.